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> the dry brush are the vulnerable that die No, the dry brush is what makes the fires get out of control and cause more damage than they "ought to," implying t

> the dry brush are the vulnerable that die No, the dry brush is what makes the fires get out of control and cause more damage than they "ought to," implying that if the brush is regularly dealt with then the broader population of trees will be better off. But (a) we're not talking about trees, we're talking about people, and (b) letting swaths of the population die from a disease does not imply the surviving population will be better off in the future. People can't die twice because we only have a single life, and callously saying "welp, you would have died later anyway, might as well die now so our stats look good" is so unbelievably short-sighted I can't believe I'm seeing this argument made by multiple people on HN. > This just seems like fear of the unknown.. Uh, yes, it's fear of what the largely unknown disease will do to us. We shouldn't blindly assume that it's "not that bad" if it occasionally rips through the population off of some belief it'll make us safer if we're routinely exposed to pandemics--as follows from your brush-and-forest-fire analogy--when we don't understand the effects of those diseases. > Natural selection is not a bad thing I do not understand this point at all. Should we not have allergen warnings on food packaging? Or glasses for folks with bad eyesight? There are plenty of reasons we intervene in the "natural course" of events to make people's lives better. Citing "natural selection" is not in any way a valid defense for just letting diseases meander through populations.

umvi 6y ago
> No, the dry brush is what makes the fires get out of control and cause more damage than they "ought to," Wait, am I making the analogy, or you? You can't just take my analogy and twist it until it fits your view. Make a new analogy, but don't correct mine. > I do not understand this point at all. Should we not have allergen warnings on food packaging? Or glasses for folks with bad eyesight? There are plenty of reasons we intervene in the "natural course" of events to make people's lives better Sure, but where do you draw the line? Should we move heaven and earth to artificially prolong the life of people extremely vulnerable to common diseases? Or just let them die and be replaced with more resilient humans?
- tenacious_tuna 6y ago
  > you can't take my analogy and twist it My whole point is your analogy is flawed and you shouldn't use it for this purpose because it trivializes significant components of the issue at hand. You said: > Once all the old/vulnerable wood is burned up, it's much more difficult for another forest fire of the same magnitude to happen ... Which is demonstrably wrong when you liken _people_ to the dry brush, which is exactly what you did. We aren't optimizing to minimize deaths in individual years (or else we'd just kill everyone right now and the death rate would spike and then drop to zero), we're optimizing for general well-being of the population. Your analogy is flat wrong, which is why I'm poking holes in it. It also belies a shocking lack of empathy for your fellow humans, which I frankly find alarming. > Where do you draw the line? I have no idea, and I don't think this is the venue to argue it, but I definitely don't think we're at it yet, and I would much rather err on the side of trying too hard to protect people's lives than not trying hard enough. For example, when death numbers from COVID were first being released, people compared them to car fatalities, going "Why are we so worried? Car crashes kill 100x as many people in the same timeframe." The point is not "we should not worry about COVID because other things are more deadly" but "there is an alarming new source of deaths, and we should be working to reduce death as much as we can in the interests of maximizing the population's happiness." EDIT: I mean, consider, the sitting US president called COVID "a hoax" for a good two months, then kept downplaying it for another two ("it'll be gone after November, you'll see"), and overall completely failed to make a plan at the federal level to, I dunno, provide more sick leave for people so they could actually avoid spreading it to their co-workers, or rent assistance for those out-of-work because we shut down the industries with high levels of communication, or support just wearing a mask when you go outside. We are so far and away from even a reasonable level of response to this it seems wholly disingenuous to pose the "but where do we _stop_ intervening?" argument.
  - umvi 6y ago
    > We aren't optimizing to minimize deaths in individual years (or else we'd just kill everyone right now and the death rate would spike and then drop to zero), we're optimizing for general well-being of the population. I disagree. If we were optimizing for general well-being of the population we wouldn't be doing things that will push hundreds of millions into poverty[0] and drive up suicide rates[1]. From my perspective all the evidence points to us optimizing either for healthcare capacity or for minimizing covid-19 deaths. > "there is an alarming new source of deaths, and we should be working to reduce death as much as we can in the interests of maximizing the population's happiness." Well, clearly a huge % of the population is not happy with the current actions and policy being performed in the name of saving lives as evidenced by this thread. [0] https://unu.edu/media-relations/releases/covid-19-fallout-could-push-half-a-billion-people-into-poverty-in-developing-countries.html https://unu.edu/media-relations/releases/covid-19-fallout-co... [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-suicide-coronavirus-more-japanese-suicides-in-october-than-total-covid-deaths/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-suicide-coronavirus-more-...

umvi 6y ago

> No, the dry brush is what makes the fires get out of control and cause more damage than they "ought to," Wait, am I making the analogy, or you? You can't just take my analogy and twist it until it fits your view. Make a new analogy, but don't correct mine. > I do not understand this point at all. Should we not have allergen warnings on food packaging? Or glasses for folks with bad eyesight? There are plenty of reasons we intervene in the "natural course" of events to make people's lives better Sure, but where do you draw the line? Should we move heaven and earth to artificially prolong the life of people extremely vulnerable to common diseases? Or just let them die and be replaced with more resilient humans?

tenacious_tuna 6y ago
> you can't take my analogy and twist it My whole point is your analogy is flawed and you shouldn't use it for this purpose because it trivializes significant components of the issue at hand. You said: > Once all the old/vulnerable wood is burned up, it's much more difficult for another forest fire of the same magnitude to happen ... Which is demonstrably wrong when you liken _people_ to the dry brush, which is exactly what you did. We aren't optimizing to minimize deaths in individual years (or else we'd just kill everyone right now and the death rate would spike and then drop to zero), we're optimizing for general well-being of the population. Your analogy is flat wrong, which is why I'm poking holes in it. It also belies a shocking lack of empathy for your fellow humans, which I frankly find alarming. > Where do you draw the line? I have no idea, and I don't think this is the venue to argue it, but I definitely don't think we're at it yet, and I would much rather err on the side of trying too hard to protect people's lives than not trying hard enough. For example, when death numbers from COVID were first being released, people compared them to car fatalities, going "Why are we so worried? Car crashes kill 100x as many people in the same timeframe." The point is not "we should not worry about COVID because other things are more deadly" but "there is an alarming new source of deaths, and we should be working to reduce death as much as we can in the interests of maximizing the population's happiness." EDIT: I mean, consider, the sitting US president called COVID "a hoax" for a good two months, then kept downplaying it for another two ("it'll be gone after November, you'll see"), and overall completely failed to make a plan at the federal level to, I dunno, provide more sick leave for people so they could actually avoid spreading it to their co-workers, or rent assistance for those out-of-work because we shut down the industries with high levels of communication, or support just wearing a mask when you go outside. We are so far and away from even a reasonable level of response to this it seems wholly disingenuous to pose the "but where do we _stop_ intervening?" argument.
- umvi 6y ago
  > We aren't optimizing to minimize deaths in individual years (or else we'd just kill everyone right now and the death rate would spike and then drop to zero), we're optimizing for general well-being of the population. I disagree. If we were optimizing for general well-being of the population we wouldn't be doing things that will push hundreds of millions into poverty[0] and drive up suicide rates[1]. From my perspective all the evidence points to us optimizing either for healthcare capacity or for minimizing covid-19 deaths. > "there is an alarming new source of deaths, and we should be working to reduce death as much as we can in the interests of maximizing the population's happiness." Well, clearly a huge % of the population is not happy with the current actions and policy being performed in the name of saving lives as evidenced by this thread. [0] https://unu.edu/media-relations/releases/covid-19-fallout-could-push-half-a-billion-people-into-poverty-in-developing-countries.html https://unu.edu/media-relations/releases/covid-19-fallout-co... [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-suicide-coronavirus-more-japanese-suicides-in-october-than-total-covid-deaths/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-suicide-coronavirus-more-...